Any one use this lens for bird photography and or BIF, i have the 100-400 but looking for something lighter and its silly cheap at the moment.
If you have sample images on Flickr or somewhere could i have a link please.

I have yet to develop the skills to capture small birds in flight. The 75-300 is certainly good enough to produce quality images, but like so many things these days, we expect the kit to do much of the hard work for us.

I freely admit I have lost the skills, I kid myself I once had, to track a bird with an all manual camera, and get a good quality image. But I did manage to get a magpie flying across in front of me, by setting the lens to manual focus, pre-focusing at the distance I had seen other magpies flying through and using an aperture that would give me the DoF to cover a little latitude and a fast enough shutter speed. Then it was all down to old clay pigeon techniques of shooting both eyes open.

If you have the skills the 75-300 will not disappoint.

__________________
Graham

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Its a nice lens; excellent for birds on bird feeders or in the trees but I struggle with it for small garden birds on the wing as there is rarely enough light to overcome the small aperture at 300mm. Anyway in a typical back garden I can never manage to pan the camera as there is not enough time to swing the camera around before the bird is in the next tree. Where you can pre-focus, say a bird leaving or arriving at a nest then you can get good results as you can on open water when there is time to track a bird.

Some examples of my 75-300mm in these threads with bigger birds (birds of prey). As Graham says, you need the skills. I just rely on luck and there are many who can do better. I have failed dismally to get small garden birds in flight, finding anything that is moving needs to be reasonably big in the viewfinder (say 4 AF boxes) to have any change of automatic focussing.

Its a nice lens; excellent for birds on bird feeders or in the trees but I struggle with it for small garden birds on the wing as there is rarely enough light to overcome the small aperture at 300mm. Anyway in a typical back garden I can never manage to pan the camera as there is not enough time to swing the camera around before the bird is in the next tree. Where you can pre-focus, say a bird leaving or arriving at a nest then you can get good results as you can on open water when there is time to track a bird.

Some examples of my 75-300mm in these threads with bigger birds (birds of prey). As Graham says, you need the skills. I just rely on luck and there are many who can do better. I have failed dismally to get small garden birds in flight.Birds of Prey At Warwick CastleSparrowhawk (this was actually shot in my back garden)Birds of Prey at Penshurst (before I got the 40-150 F/2.8; check EXIF as some shots with the 12-40mm)
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Thanks for the reply and links,the first one didn't work but i found it on a search.

Its a nice lens; excellent for birds on bird feeders or in the trees but I struggle with it for small garden birds on the wing as there is rarely enough light to overcome the small aperture at 300mm. ...................

Ads a matter of interest, what ISO setting are people comfortable with? As one who grew up with Kodachrome ISO25, I don't seem to find 'small' apertures over-restricting.